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Vinegar as biocide?

warmmilk
By warmmilk
in Custom Loop and Exotic Cooling
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Is it safe to run vinegar as biocide for a week or 2? Maybe 3? I know lots of people use vinegar to rinse their watercooling equipment, but is it safe if some heat is introduced?

Or would I just be better off running straight distiller water?

HP something | 5600X | Corsair  16GB | Zotac ArcticStorm GTX 1080 Ti

CaseLabs SM8 | EK Supremacy | UT60 420 | ST30 360 | ST30 240

Gentle Typhoon's and Noctua's and Noiseblocker eLoop's

 

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I personally wouldn't do it but I have no idea if it would cause problems. Why do you need to run your loop without biocide for 2 weeks?

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I ran into a couple unforeseen problems when putting my loop together, so I gotta change out a few fittings. I'm planning to use vice Dragon fluid once I'm all done with it, but I don't want to have to waste any draining the loop and stuff to replace the fittings

HP something | 5600X | Corsair  16GB | Zotac ArcticStorm GTX 1080 Ti

CaseLabs SM8 | EK Supremacy | UT60 420 | ST30 360 | ST30 240

Gentle Typhoon's and Noctua's and Noiseblocker eLoop's

 

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I'd recommend running pure distilled instead of vinegar. Vinegar is acidic,

which might have all kinds of unforeseen side effects with your blocks and/or

tubing. It might work, but pure distilled will work, especially if it's only for such

a short amount of time.

BUILD LOGS: HELIOS - Latest Update: 2015-SEP-06 ::: ZEUS - BOTW 2013-JUN-28 ::: APOLLO - Complete: 2014-MAY-10
OTHER STUFF: Cable Lacing Tutorial ::: What Is ZFS? ::: mincss Primer ::: LSI RAID Card Flashing Tutorial
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So I don't have to worry about mold or any other kinda micro organisms if it's only 2-3 weeks?

HP something | 5600X | Corsair  16GB | Zotac ArcticStorm GTX 1080 Ti

CaseLabs SM8 | EK Supremacy | UT60 420 | ST30 360 | ST30 240

Gentle Typhoon's and Noctua's and Noiseblocker eLoop's

 

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So I don't have to worry about mold or any other kinda micro organisms if it's only 2-3 weeks?

I would be extremely surprised. Before premixed coolants became the norm, many

people ran pure distilled for years without issues, sometimes with and sometimes

without additives such as silver or anti-freeze (a pretty potent biocide IIRC).

Even if you do get some biology going in your loop, I would argue that while it may

not look very appetizing, it wouldn't do any actual damage to your components and

could be cleaned out again. If you run transparent tubing you might get some

discoloration, but I'd estimate that could easily happen with vinegar as well, if

not worse (depending on how resistant your tubing is to acidic coolant).

With vinegar I wouldn't be so sure about that (not that I have actually tried running

vinegar, this really is just an educated guess, but I doubt anyone actually has some

hard data on this).

BUILD LOGS: HELIOS - Latest Update: 2015-SEP-06 ::: ZEUS - BOTW 2013-JUN-28 ::: APOLLO - Complete: 2014-MAY-10
OTHER STUFF: Cable Lacing Tutorial ::: What Is ZFS? ::: mincss Primer ::: LSI RAID Card Flashing Tutorial
FORUM INFO: Community Standards ::: The Moderating Team ::: 10TB+ Storage Showoff Topic

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I'll just stick to water then, seems like less of a risk

HP something | 5600X | Corsair  16GB | Zotac ArcticStorm GTX 1080 Ti

CaseLabs SM8 | EK Supremacy | UT60 420 | ST30 360 | ST30 240

Gentle Typhoon's and Noctua's and Noiseblocker eLoop's

 

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